This invention relates to an optical scanning mechanism. It has a very large focal plane area coverage and can accept a large f-cone from an external imaging system. It has a scan rate of up to 200 lines per second and can generate several original scan patterns by varying the settings of the invention.
There are numerous mechanical scanning systems which have been built that provide one and two-dimensional image scan patterns for optical systems. These systems range from simple two-axis gimbals and rotating multifaceted cylinders to cam-actuated tilting mirrors or prisms and complex combinations of mirrors, lenses, prisms, and holographic hybrids.
One of these systems uses a pair of counter-rotating prisms in a tube, but this system is strongly wavelength dependent. In all such systems, there is invariably, a trade-off between the optical throughput, the scan rate, and the Field of View (FOV). This problem is particularly acute for systems which must operate at low light levels under conditions which require high (real-time) scan rates and wide fields of view. In such cases the optical designer usually abandons mechanical scan generators in favor of arrays or other non-mechanical means of image generation. However, for some spectral regions, these alternate approaches do not exist. This is true for the very far infrared and submillimeter spectral regions. Furthermore, in these regions, the minimum image resolution spot size is large compared to the visible spectral region. In order to scan an image with enough resolution cells to synthesize patterns, the FOV and the physical area covered in the focal plane must also be large.